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Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

choppingboard.recipes

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Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

#51

Post by Freak_NL »

JepZ wrote: post #30
askvictor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things that would be so nice would be easy scaling, and unit conversion (even better if that's automatic)

Well, as surprising as it might sound there seem to be many units in the kitchen which are not so easy to convert. One example: How many milliliters does a table spoon have? Google says 14.7868 (american table spoon). I have read from 6 to 25... I mean the problem is that the people who writes those recipes use different definitions of the same unit. And that is just one example. How should you convert units which ar…

1 US customary table spoon (~14.8ml) is conventionally taken as 15ml, a teaspoon as 5ml, a cup as 240ml. That's roughly what you get when you buy a set of measuring spoons/cups as well; some may be a tad smaller (following the US measurements), and some are aligned with these metric values — the difference is mostly negligible.

These are quite standardised unless you are using something like Australian tablespoons¹ (but then any American following that recipe would run into problems as well). The US customary cup and spoon measures were introduced exactly to solve the problem of measurement ambiguity in recipes! Nineteenth century cookbooks can be hard to follow because of the significant variation in the interpretation of smidgens, dashes, pinches, and (then) spoons and cups.

1: Are these really a thing? Any Australian care to chime in?

Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

#52

Post by agotterer »

tinebak wrote: post #44
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #4

This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…

I made a recipe scraper that doesn't look at the structured (schema) data, but instead "reads" the whole page to detect the recipe. I found that there are too many recipe sites that don't use the schema rules including, of course, recipes from Facebook posts and emails. Users have used it to copy recipes into their recipe boxes from more than 70,000 different websites. There are a lot of different formats out there!

Can you share a link?

Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

#53

Post by tinebak »

agotterer wrote: post #52
tinebak wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a recipe scraper that doesn't look at the structured (schema) data, but instead "reads" the whole page to detect the recipe. I found that there are too many recipe sites that don't use the schema rules including, of course, recipes from Facebook posts and emails. Users have used it to copy recipes into their recipe boxes from more than 70,000 different websites. There are a lot of different formats out there!

Can you share a link?

Happy to! http://www.copymethat.com

Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

#55

Post by pjc50 »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #4

This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…

Note that industrially this already exists - the EPOS company I work for has quite a sophisticated recipe, stock control and re-ordering solution. In that context, one important thing to handle is variations ("no cheese" etc)

Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

#56

Post by [deleted] »

svnv wrote: post #32
askvictor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things that would be so nice would be easy scaling, and unit conversion (even better if that's automatic)

I created http://www.recipastely.com/ to simplify recipe conversion between us and iso units a few years back. It's not perfect but it seems to work fine for me.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

#57

Post by germanier »

tkp wrote: post #40
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #4

This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…

A nice use-case seen on the recipe website "Marmiton" is a widget to ajust ingredients quantity to the target number of eaters. You can see it here[1] for example, "Ingrédients / Nombre de personnes", lower in the right column. [1] http://www.marmiton.org/recettes/recette_courgettes-farcies-...

This implementation looks better than the ones commonly found on German recipe sites. As soon as you start adjusting they show you "3/8 pinches of salt" or "5/6 eggs".

Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

#58

Post by tinebak »

pjc50 wrote: post #54
tinebak wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to! http://www.copymethat.com

Nice :) Is there some artefact of the sorting that puts only pizza recipes on the front page?

That's funny! I'm not seeing any pizza recipes now. It shows the latest shared recipes that have images. There are trends, though. One person wrote and complained that vegans were taking over the website, but the next day the Community was back to having lots of meat. The app got a bad review in the app store because this person said that Copy Me That was always showing pot recipes!

Re: Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages

#60

Post by lpasselin »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #4

This really seems to be an exercise in 'structuring recipe data' rather than the ins-and-outs of scraping. Seems like a much-needed task; is there anything approaching a 'standard' for recipe data already? "ingredients": [ "600g pineapple, peeled, chopped" ] This seems like a prime candidate for improvement; something like the following would seem to be more useful: "ingredients": [{ "ingredient": "pineapple", "quant…

Yes, this one is the most used http://microformats.org/wiki/h-recipe
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